Sales hat on .....

Alexandre Benson Smith wrote:

> Lester Caine wrote:
>> Rather than HOW, Alexandre the first question should have been WHAT.
>> What do you want to actually program?
>>
>
> For the start I plan to develop some web interfaces to search trough key
> points of my ERP system, more focused at first on the sales module
> (stock available, for who it's being sold, last prices applied to the
> product for that costumer, financial details to see if I can sell
> without risks and the like)

bitweaver's commerce package any use?
Adding modules to bitweaver is simple, and you gain all the infrastructure of
the interface and security management ;)

>> Different requirements allow for different solutions, and while ADOdb is not
>> the fastest of abstraction layers it allows collaboration between different
>> groups. Smarty provides a well developed display framework, and while I may
>> disagree with decisions at times on the whole I have a framework that meets my
>> needs.
>
> This is the kind of experience that I am looking for, for a newcomer
> smarty could look pretty cool, but as one gets the hand dirty doing more
> than trivial, one could make a conclusion that such template system is
> not designed for complex tasks, and to handle it's limitations is
> hacking around with band-aid code and that would be more productive to
> not use such solutions. Since all that is new to me, I just like to
> avoid that kind of deception after spending some months of work. :-) Or
> one could say, "Guy ! You should use a template system like smarty,
> there is no way to develop a medium sized dynamic web-site without such
> tool". Of course what I expected to hear, and what I am hearing so far
> is a mixed of the both, and that's exactly what I wish, I will take the
> arguments and make a decision based on that.

I could certainly get away without a lot of the facilities provided by the
theme's templating, but at the end of the day - it works.

>> One requirement was that the style of the results had to be easily
>> modified to match the style of a particular customer. This is easy to achieve
>> using the integrated theme system, and normally just involves adjusting the
>> colours used in the .css files, although layout can similarly be revised if
>> the target system prefers right hand menus instead of left for example.
>>
>> So what are your target requirements :)
>
> At first:
> Develop a web interface for search information of my ERP system to
> provided quick information to salesman off site, just read data for a start.
>
> Since that is my first project, I look for something that help me to
> make that software and guide me on good practices. I will make all kind
> of mistakes (security, session handling, data validation and so on) my
> hope on adopting something to start on (framework) is that it will guide
> me, and show me what I need to take care (because the foundation will
> provide that I think it will be easier to do and spot what I should do),
> on the other hand, I have a fear that I will get a lot of
> code/complexity that I don't need.

bitweaver is probably OTT for what you want, but it sounds like at the end of
the day you want the same thing that I do for managing the customer
information, and that is something I've been doing with bitweaver for some
time, so in addition to 'selling' the concept to customer I have to be happy
that it actually works for day to day business activities :)

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
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